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Lightroom with an external hard drive

I run Lightroom on my laptop and since I started shooting RAW with my Samsung GX-10 the hard drive is filling up pretty quickly. I didn’t want the hassle of fitting a bigger internal drive so I thought I would see if I could get Lightroom to work with an external USB hard drive. This post explains what I did and how I now work with new drive.

I convert my camera DNG files to compressed DNG on import to Lightroom and these are stored in DVD sized directories. As each DVD directory fills up I just create another and continue. Once one of these directories is complete I never create any more new files in it. If I need to edit in an external program I save the derivative file in a separate directory tree – these are also DVD sized for backup. In this way I’m only ever changing the latest RAW and DERIVED directories.

So my directory structure was as follows (this is just an example, there are many more directories than this). A series of DVD sized ‘buckets’ with dated sub-directories for individual shoots.

Render previews of the images moved to the external drive so that I can view them in the Lightroom Library module without the external drive attached.

Only the most recent images that I’m still working on in Develop will be on the internal drive.

And here’s how I did it.

First thing to do is get the external drive configured so that when you plug it in it always maps to the same Windows drive letter. I changed mine to always map as drive Z: so that it does not clash when I plug in other devices.

On this Z: drive I created a new directory call “Archive” which will be the equivalent of the top-level “Photographs” directory on my internal drive.

Start Lightroom.

In the Library view select the ‘+’ next to “Folder” and add the new “Z:\Archive” directory from the external drive.

Now do the following for each Lightroom folder you want to move to the external drive.

Save the metadata to all the files in the folder.

Render standard size previews for all the files in folder so you can browse the pictures in the Library module when the external drive is not connected.

In the Lightroom Library module select the folder name and drag it to the Archive folder. You’ll see a dialog for confirmation that you want to move all the files (including the sub-directories) and then all the files are moved.

So now I have 2 top-level folders in Lightroom; “Photographs” expands to show all the photos on my laptop and “Archive” expands to show all the photos on my laptop.

If I use Lightroom without the external drive connected the “Archive” folder and it’s sub-folders are shown in red to indicate that the image files are missing I can still view them in the Library because of the standard previews in the catalogue.

The only thing I found is that when I moved the folders Lightroom reported a few missing files when I knew they were still there. This appears to be temporary as it corrected itself when I restarted Lightroom. Later I found a note in the Help file that says this can happen. Of course when you browse the Library without the external drive attached it will report missing files but that is to be expected. When you restart Lightroom with the drive attached everything works again as normal.

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How did you give an external drive a fixed drive letter in Windows XP?

I know how to change drive letter assignments and have searched on Microsoft’s site but have not found a means to make a drive letter assignment to a removable device persistent.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844 refers but does not mention persistence. My understanding is that the system expects to find the main boot partition on C:\. Fixed internal drives may be assigned any other letter of the alphabet but removable devices will be assigned a drive letter when they are connected. I have not found any info on making drvies persistent.

This is how I got my external drive to always appear as drive Z:, it’s the same as for a fixed drive.

1. Plug in the external USB drive and by default it uses the next available letter, e.g. G:
2. Under Administrative Tools start the Computer Management application.
3. Select the Disk Management entry to display the list of disks.
4. Right-click on the external drive entry and select the Change Drive Letter and Paths option.
5. Use the Change option to set whatever drive letter you want and that should be it, e.g. Z:

Now whenever you re-attach the external drive Windows XP identifies it and automatically assigns the correct drive letter.

Hi there. Make sure the USB is at lease 2.0. Anything slower will dramatically reduce your Lightroom operating speed. I recommend Firewire if possible. Don’t forget to backup also. I just lost 500GB of photos..:(

I could be wrong but I think Fire wire is faster. Both USB 2.0 and firewire are very fast however. Be careful becuase sometimes on DELL not all of your USB ports are high speed. On my older DELL 2 are fast and the others are slower.

You can RIGHT click on any drive here and change the letters which are assigned. Also sometimes when a drive is first installed it may not have a signature and will not show up but this area will allow you to add a signature so the drive will appear.

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